BCC2004/SDC/1
Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access
ALA Midwinter Conference, San Diego, CA, January 10 and 12, 2004
Reported by Nancy Lorimer, Chair, Subcommittee on Descriptive Cataloging
The Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC:DA) met in two
sessions during the ALA Midwinter meeting in San Diego, CA. The Chair, Mary Larsgaard (University of California, Santa
Barbara), led the discussions.
This report includes only items that may be of interest specifically to
the music library community. For more information about the meeting and for reports about activities mentioned below,
please see the CC:DA web page at
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/jca/ccda/.
Reports
Report from the Library of Congress Representative (Barbara
Tillett)
LC has now completed the 78 rpm album cataloging project, cataloging at
core level over 5,000 albums of classical, jazz, popular music and spoken word recordings. The Initial Bibliographic
Control Creation Project for spoken word, classical and multi-volume CD-ROMs and other formats, has processed 34,494
compact discs and 8,458 CD-Rs in the past year. LC is also working to formulate cataloging policies for the anticipated
move to Unicode, perhaps as early as the end of 2004. The full LC report will soon be available on the CC:DA website.
Report from ALA Publishing Services (Don Chatham)
ALA Publishing Services is working on a public website for February or
March 2004 release. It will serve primarily as a promotional site for publications and as a link to the JSC website. Also,
a new edition of the Concise AACR2 has been sent to JSC for review.
Report of the ALA Representative to the Joint Steering Committee
(Matthew Beacom)
Ann Huthwaite has completed her term as the Australian Committee on
Cataloging (ACOC) representative on JSC and therefore also will be stepping down as Chair of JSC. In her place, Deirdre
Kiorgaard will be the ACOC representative and Matthew Beacom will become Chair of JSC. His tenure will be very brief since
he will be completing his term as ALA representative to JSC after the ALA Annual conference in June 2004.
The next JSC meeting will take place April 19-22 in Ottawa, Canada.
There JSC intends to move forward on AACR3 and to discuss the hiring of an editor to lead the new edition project. Also,
JSC will concentrate on discussing the reconceptualization of Part 1 of AACR2, based on the work of the CC:DA Task Force on
Consistency, the work of the ALA/BL Task Force on Reconceptualizing Chapter 9, and various discussion papers from the
constituencies.
There will be a 2004 Revision package to AACR2 to be published in the
summer. This may be the last revision package issued for AACR2—-it is likely that any new revisions will be held until the
publication of AACR3. Revisions of importance to music catalogers include the addition of the option to use terms in common
use to Chapters 6 & 7 (paralleling Chapter 9) and changes to Area 5 (Physical description) in Chapter 9 to
differentiate between direct and remote resources.
Report from the CC:DA/MARBI Program Planning Committee for 2004
Preconference
CC:DA and MARBI are hosting a preconference before the ALA 2004 Annual
meeting in Orlando. It is called “Back to the Future: Understanding the Functional Requirements of Bibliographic
Records (FRBR) Model and its Impact on Users, OPACS, and Knowledge Organization”. More information, including a list
of speakers and topics is available on the preconference website at
http://www.ala.org/ala/alcts/alctsconted/alctsceevents/alctspreconf/backfutureunderstanding.htm.
Report from the Task Force on Rule 21.0D (Jennifer Bowen for
Ann Caldwell)
The Task Force was charged with exploring the history and current use
(in OPACs and metadata) of and problems with relator information as given in Rule 21.0D (Designations of Function). The
Task Force has presented its final report, which will soon be available on the CC:DA website. The report includes a rule
change proposal that expands the possibilities for use of relator information and also makes the rule less
“book-centric”.
Report of the Task Force on Consistency across Part I of AACR2
(John Attig)
The Task Force has now presented 395 pages of documents to CC:DA. It
has completed work on Areas 2 (Edition Area), 3 (Material (or type of publication) Specific Area), 4 (Publication,
Distribution, etc. Area), and 6 (Series Area) and is currently working on Area 7 (Notes Area).
Proposed changes by CCS Executive Committee to CC:DA liaison
policies (Jennifer Bowen)
CCS is the division of ALA to which CC:DA reports. As happens with all
committees, discussion groups, etc. CC:DA is up for review with CCS. As part of this review, the CCS Chair, Jennifer Bowen,
has taken the opportunity to propose changes to the document that determines what groups are eligible for representation on
CC:DA. The most important change is a proposal to do away with the limitation that a non-ALA organization may not have
representation on the committee if it is already represented by an ALA unit with the same focus. This rule, while never a
problem for the music community, has prevented OLAC (Online and Audiovisual Catalogers) from having a liaison to CC:DA,
much to the detriment of the A-V community.
Report from the Task Force on SMDs (Mary Larsgaard)
The Task Force was created at the request of JSC to write a background
paper on SMDs, focusing on the principles, purposes, and structures of the SMDs, the relation of SMD terms to natural
language, and the relation of the SMDs to other parts of the description. The request was made in response to the long
discussions over the implementation of terms in common use in Chapters 6, 7 and 9.
Rule Revision Proposals
Rules for early printed monographs (John Attig)
The work of the Task Force on Consistency raised some questions in JSC
about the need, scope, and principles of rules for early printed monographs in AACR. JSC asked ALA to prepare a discussion
paper on the Task Force revisions for early printed monographs. The current discussion paper takes the form of preliminary
issues to be discussed before getting into details. CC:DA voted to form a task force to study the early printed monograph
rules.
Rule revision proposals
Two rule change proposals submitted to CC:DA for ALA 2003 Annual last
June and sent back for further development were again presented. The proposals were to change German orthography rules as
presented in Appendix A, Capitalization to conform to the new international orthography rules and to remove the Turkish
word “bir” from the list of initial articles. Both proposals were passed by CC:DA.
“Terms in common use” (formerly known as
“conventional terminology” proposals
At the ALA Annual meeting in June 2003, CC:DA discussed various
proposals and comments regarding “terms in common use” in Chapters 6, 7 and 9. These included proposals from the
Bibliographic Control Committee (BCC) of MLA, the Canadian Committee on Cataloging (CCC), a discussion paper by John Attig
(Penn State), and comments from OLAC, the Association of Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), and the Association of Archival
Moving Image Materials (AMIA). While CC:DA members had previously been fairly enthusiastic about introducing terms in
common use in some way into Chapters 6 & 7, things began to turn around at this meeting, thanks primarily to members
Matthew Wise, Jay Weitz and John Attig. Voting on any of the proposals was delayed so that further discussion could take
place.
Summer discussion began, not surprisingly, with members going back and
forth on possible terms and whether ALA should support any measure at all that changed Chapters 6 & 7. CC:DA members
were very divided on this issue. There ended up being 3 votes as follows:
1st motion: Approve 4JSC/CCC/6/Rev (CCC recommendations to add terms in
common use to Chapter 6) subject to the emendations to the list of terms so the final list would be: sound compact disc,
digital audio tape, and sound DVD, retain the term minidisc, retain older terms from the list (i.e. the current SMDs), and
reject Super AudioCD. It should also be noted that adoption of some of the recommended new terms may cause redundancy in
“other physical details” that would need to be addressed. CC:DA also recommends that a scope note be provided for
the recommended new terms, and that JSC consider the MLA strategy in CC:DA/MLA/2003/1 with regard to using other physical
details to bring out type of encoding and restricting current SMDs to analog.
This motion was defeated 2-6.
2nd motion: Move that ALA not support the changes to SMDs offered in
4JSC/CCC/6/Rev. ALA has serious concerns about applying the concept of common usage to the SMDs in Chapter 6. Because of
these concerns, ALA does not believe that the current list of SMDs in Chapter 6 should be changed. ALA believes that any
further contemplation of changes to the SMDs in Chapter 6 consider SMDs in conjunction with the other rules related to SMDs
and include an analysis of the functions of SMDs.
This motion passed 6-2 with the understanding that the ALA
representative to JSC would expand the response to include a summary of the discussions held on the subject.
3rd motion: Same wording as the 2nd motion but for Chapter 7.
This motion passed 6-2.
Terms in common use were then discussed at the JSC meeting in September
2003. The members accepted, albeit reluctantly, ALA’s arguments resulted in the current SMDs being retained in the 2004
revision of AACR2. However, other JSC members insisted that the option to use terms in common use be added to both
Chapters 6 & 7. Because of this, the 2004 revision will include the option in both chapters, using the wording of the
option as given in Chapter 9. In all instances, the rule is optional.
What remains to be seen, is how the Library of Congress will react to
these optional additions. The Subcommittee on Descriptive Cataloging, on behalf of the Bibliographic Control Committee,
will be writing a letter to LC, stating our views on the use of the optional rule. Our response will be guided by comments
from those attending the SDC open meeting at MLA annual. We also welcome comments from anyone with an interest in the issue.
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Last updated February 28, 2004